Crash and David Cronenberg (Erotic 90’s, Part 16)
One of the only high-profile NC-17 releases post-Showgirls, David Cronenberg’s Crash was the kind of dark adult art film that the rating was supposedly created to support. We’ll talk about how Crash f...
19 Sep 20231h 23min
“Lesbian Chic”: Bound and Anne Heche in Wild Side (Erotic 90’s, Part 15)
At the beginning of the 90s, lesbians were a punchline for a male-gaze-oriented media, an easy target for expressing the anxiety that women might not need men after all. By the middle of the decade, w...
12 Sep 20231h 10min
Introducing: Glitter & Might
In Glitter & Might, a new series exploring the intersection of show business and politics, bestselling author Shawn Levy unpacks the story of Lew Wasserman, the shadowy legend who lorded over Hollywoo...
25 Aug 20233min
Showgirls, Jade, and the fall of Joe Eszterhas. (Erotic 90’s, Part 14)
Joe Eszterhas’s tenure as the hottest screenwriter in town ended with two notorious 1995 flops: the NC-17 rated Showgirls (directed, like Basic Instinct, by Paul Verhoeven) and Jade (produced, like Sl...
27 Jun 20231h 32min
The Last Seduction, Disclosure, & Fear of the Female Boss (Erotic 90’s, Part 13)
The 90s were obsessed with what magazine writer Tad Friend would describe as “do me feminism” – and the attendant fear that men could be victims of female sexual aggression. Two films from 1994 marrie...
20 Jun 20231h 11min
Sliver and Sharon Stone as Superstar (Erotic 90’s, Part 12)
Sharon Stone and Joe Eszterhas’s post-Basic Instinct reunion film was one of the most troubled productions of the 90s. A post-Hitchcock tale of sexual surveillance given a technological update for the...
13 Jun 20231h 16min
Indecent Proposal (Erotic 90’s, Part 11)
Are men okay? Several films from 1993 answered that question with a resounding no. One of the highest grossing movies of its year, Adrian Lyne’s Indecent Proposal was misunderstood as a gimmick, and i...
6 Jun 20231h 26min
Sex, Erotica and Body of Evidence (Erotic 90’s, Part 10)
In the early 90s, Madonna was the biggest pop star in the world, and she used – and in the minds of some, squandered – her star capital to launch a multi-media exploration of sexuality: the album Erot...
30 Mai 20231h 24min
